HI I'M AMBER

I like being regular and pronounce it “regler.” If I can get to the keyboard quickly enough, I’ll write out of the holy, terrible, and fantastic regular. I like a little house and a big yard. I whirl from child to sink to garden to spill, but I love to steep in different cultures and countries, too. I love to travel. Most of all, I love to write. I never questioned what I would grow up to be. Learn More About Me »

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Sonic Youth

I went home again –

the mountain, saw the vertical beams of our gymnasium overlooking the hills, all the slight spreading of red at the fingertips of maples. The sun was hot, but the air had a glaze of cool in it, picking up little hairs and standing them on end.

I bought a bag of cotton candy with four tickets at the harvest festival, and I stood to the side and watched a woman sweat into some popular funnel-cake batter. A band played, “I’ll Fly Away.” I tapped my fingers against my leg. We sang, too, quietly. Ian bounced at the knees, the song he knows well, and we held hands and smiled.

I saw my cousin there. We love each other – even though the conversation began in a polite howdy and ended in a nondescript embrace. We don’t come out and say anything we know of things passed. He’s the first person that read poetry to me, first person to hand me a joint, to make me laugh so hard at nothing, we in Converse shoes and flannel shirts, we inhaling right about the time emo kids were being potty trained. He knows well the trouble I borrowed back then, the trouble I felt right for borrowing, confirming my brokenness.

I’m back in Arkansas now, and my cousin emailed me yesterday explaining the death (another one) of one of our friends. It happened two years ago, and I didn’t even know. I reeled all night about those friends, the ones still rocking life, how I loved them and didn’t know well then how to show it.

Now that I’ve moved away, had my own babies, and believed in Jesus, becoming someone I never ever thought I would be, Home is a sick sweet identity scrambler, a rolling scene with sight and sound alarms for the memory. So much of my life has been defined by who I love, and with love, a heart doesn’t divide, but rather it multiplies – as when a child is added to a family.

I will never not love the ones who gathered in the side room in the smoke cloud, Mad Season.

You think when you’re young that if you live long enough to get better, the old will somehow break off, and you’ll look back and call it Sonic Youth. Boom, then gone. But what I’ve learned is that your youth never stops bleeding into our older age. Not even fear keeps it from happening.

To the young: Love well while you can, and let who you love be those you want to keep with you forever. Because they do stay with you.

While still in Alabama, I drove by Robbie’s road, and I thought he must still live there, and I smiled and wished him well. So many of us lost ourselves in the same exact place we thought we had been found. Home can be like that, limbo – a balance between love and lost.

Home is a sick sweet identity scrambler, a rolling scene with sight and sound alarms for the memory. So much of my life has been defined by who I love, and with love, a heart doesn’t divide, but rather it multiplies – as when a child is added to a family.

This, this put words on something I've been struggling with for a long time. Thank you for the clarity.

I think that's why story telling is so important- and listening- because it is in these stories, in is in the Story, that we find the blurry edges of our identity, moving ever closer (I hope) to the ultimate Story Teller. But we can't move towards there if we never speak, if we never hear, if we never see all the stories written across the sky and street for us, wherever it is that we are.

Jessica

Amber, I am just in a puddle over here.And it is not why I thought it would be after reading this. Man, our roads to this point sound the same. (in so many ways) Usually, when I mill over my youth and "go there" with music or visiting an old stomping ground I am a melancholy fool. Today when I read these familiar words of yours, I felt struck to tears by mercy. For both of us. I am in complete awe and praising the One who plucked us out of that hole. The people who came to my mind from those times, they are still there.

Jessica

Jessica, I've spent too long a time looking back and hissing, nearly afraid to acknowledge love. I thought that was what protected me from falling off the deep end.

That isn't the truth at all, though. Every one of us that I know of have worked hard to survive here in the ways we know how, and over that, I do indeed have mercy - just as I imagine some might look here and see a fool for believing the way she does, but there's grace in the empathy.

The truth is that at one point I was so far gone that I believed I would die, and I just waited around for it to happen. We are all made of the same adam-stock. Mercy is required, because sons and daughters of Eve can't survive without it.

Seth

This was serious good. I know that I'm "supposed" to say that, what with the wedding ring and all, but I mean it.

I know a few of us in the room loved the same way, but our smokey rooms were different. Contrived clouds of incense and religious pretense. The love on the other side of the contrived (or emotive) is so much better. But the contrived (or emotive) doesn't go away. 'Tis true.

These are the moments where I wish the Common Guild was back up and running. I wish Brock-star and Hamster would wander by. They'd both have good stories.

Now to Him who is able to keep us...

Jessica

Jessica

One more thing, a question,... I often struggle with what "that life" that I lived means for me as a mom. I too, feel the hissing surface and I know that it often causes me to take cover when it comes to parenting my children. Fear.

Susan Gilchrist

Ah friend. You have me wanting to unearth my own past...something I've never talked about to current friends, much less written about. I think I was happy it was back there. Behind. Even though as you said, it colors the now, regardless.

It's pressing into the windows now though, waving and pretending we left on good terms.

I wrote yesterday to one whom I handed the first joint -- stole her and her little friends off to the fields above Carp Park, before a movie while a crowd played volleyball there. Peiter, from our younger days glided into a tree and died instantly. She responded that she loved him more than all the rest -- having just left her new husband with wee child -- and that life was strange in its passing. Yes, so strange, for somehow along the way we end up choosing who to leave and what we will keep. It all bleeds together, though, and I think the rapture may be no less when I hear from afar that it is all still as it was. So many have died, and as you said, they just kept on careening towards that end, never slowing after the season's should have changed. It is so good to be understood.

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Story-Letter

A Haines Home CompanionThe Monthly Story-Letter

This letter is for friends, family, and fellow-writers and artists who like the quieter ways to engage online. I'll be one part goofy to two parts poetry. I'll share my story with you and hope you'll respond with yours, too.